Ideas for Outdoor Garden Edging

Brick

• Brick is an inexpensive and attractive material for landscape edging. The bricks that you place around your flower beds may be set upright deep into the ground or may tilt over onto one another like fallen dominoes to mimic a herringbone pattern. You can use leftover bricks from house construction to make your flower beds seem like an extension of your home, or you can select brick in a coordinating color.

Native Stone

• Smooth, round stones, such as the kind found in the bottoms of rivers, can be placed along the edge of a flower bed to give the bed a natural woodland appearance. Smooth stones should be backed by metal or plastic edging to more effectively block weeds and grass from creeping into your bed. Stone can be found in a range of shapes and colors. It can be placed in a thin row so that it resembles a stone necklace, or it can be piled into a trench to resemble a dry creek bed around which your flower bed grows.

Wattle

• Wattle fences are still used for garden borders in parts of England. In the United States, they were used in colonial farms before the invention of barbed wire. Today, wattle fencing is primarily used to give a garden a rustic feel. You can create wattle fencing for your border by pounding upright sticks into the ground to form stakes and then weaving springy willow or grapevine around the uprights in a basket weave.

Plastic Edging

• Plastic edging is commonly sold through garden centers or hardware stores. This edging type is buried along the perimeter of a flower bed. Plastic creates a barrier that is deep enough that grass roots, which are called rhizomes, cannot grow beneath it. Plastic is also just tall enough that surface grass runners, which are called stolons, cannot grow over it. Edging made of plastic is also placed so that it cannot be damaged by a lawn mower if it is mowed over.